Connor's Work

WHEELCHAIR MODEL

Our first Maya refresh lesson. We were told to model a wheelchair. It's a little messy and unfinished, but that doesn't matter too much. We were told to UV it, but I didn't at all get far with that.

GENERAL REFRESH

ROBOT V2

We were told to model a robot, as a callback to the same assignment last year. I modelled the same robot, Buffet. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to model a body, and what I did have is pretty rough around the edges.

WINE GLASS - STARTER ACTIVITY

For our starter activity, we were told to model a wineglass in 10 minutes. A simple wineglass using what we've learnt so far. I'm pretty proud of it, but it's a little rough around the edges.

PROGRAMMING CURVES

We started off the topic by touching on using code to generate curves. We didn't go too in-depth into this, obviously, as manually generating the curves through script would be tedious and inefficient. Connor provided us with a few lines of sample code, and we were introduced to the script editor as a whole.

DRAWING CURVES

We were introduced to the different curve brushes, how to go about them, their properties. The above image uses a sort of freehand curve brush, so it's unsteady and not recommended. We were instead told to use a brush more similar to the pen from Adobe Illustrator.

DIFFERENT CURVE FUNCTIONS

Using this other, aforementioned curve brush, we were taught about different curve related functions, like loft and revolve, as well as further exploring the use of curves in general.

WINEGLASS, USING CURVES

And finally, calling back to the starter activity, we were told to use what we learned about curves and the revolve tool to model another wineglass. It was a little tricky to work with, and I got stuck with the simple act of giving the stem thickness and shape once the revolve tool was used, but I made it work.

Once we finished with the base curve model, we were told to, well, actually turn it into a mesh. Simple enough. But then we were told to retopologize it. I didn't get to reach a point I was super happy with from this point, retopologizing was a little finnicky, and we ran out of time. Either way, I got it done.

SOMBRERO

With the remainder of the lesson, we had to model a sombrero using curves. A little bit easier overall due to the shape of a sombrero, but still a little finnicky. In the end, though, I still ran out of time before I could finalize the shape. I didn't get to turn it into a mesh or retopologize, but I don't know if anyone really got to that point.

FLOWER - STARTER ACTIVITY 2

Second lesson on curves. We were told to model a flower using what we learned last lesson on curves. Not much to say on this. I'm not too happy with it, and the topology is like, irreversibly terrible.

SWEEP MESHES

We were introduced to sweep meshes, how they work, how to use them alongside curves and live objects, generally going in-depth into them. They seem pretty fun to use, honestly. We were told to turn a cylinder into a live object, allowing us to draw a perfect curve around it. We were taught how to turn this curve into a sweep mesh, allowing us to get a sort of wrapped-around rope or vine look. With this, we were told to create a sort of braided-rope effect around the object.

And this, is something else.

We were told to take a cube in Maya, edge loop it around each edge, take it into Z-Brush, and carve a brick texture into it. We were given 25 minutes. I didn't get to finish it, and it came out really rough. It was really annoying working with the cube model because of the way they were edgelooped, to be honest.

Later, we were told to carve a fur texture into the cube, also in 25 minutes. I got sick of working with the cube, so I opened a sphere instead. It got a little easier, but not by a lot. Likely because it was fur we were told to carve. I ended up with this after playing around with most of the brushes. It isn't too good, but it works.

We were walked through UV unwrapping, different functions of the UV editor and the importance of properly making use of the space provided. Bad UVs will result in weird looking, warped, incorrectly placed textures, and are generally hard to work with, so this lesson was focused on teaching us how to unwrap UVs well.

CLOTH PHYSICS

In this lesson, we were introduced to cloth physics, constraints, and the FX layout. Very simple, but I didn't get much screenshots along the way, unfortunately. We were walked through customizing how cloth collides with something, such as how much it sticks or its stretch and bend resistances.

BED

Knowing the basics of cloth physics, we were told to create a new scene. We were told to simply create a floor plane with a passive collider. On top, we were given 10 minutes to build a simple bedframe, obviously with a passive collider, too.

After this, we were told to place a subdivided plane above the bedframe and give it cloth physics. Once we were happy with how this blanket plane looked draped over the bedframe, we duplicated it in that state.

We were introduced to the "Pressure" tab in the cloth shape properties. We created a new cube, thin, subdivided, for use as a pillow. Giving it cloth physics and messing with the pressure settings, it inflated into a vague pillow shape. 

Pretty proud with how the bed came out.

FLAG

And finally, with what we learned throughout the lesson, we were told to create a waving flag. Very simple. It took a bit for me to get the wind settings right, and it still didn't look quite right, but here it is.

I attached a texture of the Petoria flag on it, of course.